Category: Current Events

Guest Contributor – TomD – 11JAN2025 – California Wildfires

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TomD

I live on the Florida panhandle, the population isn’t nearly as dense as central and south Florida. There are extensive farmlands and 10’s of thousands of acres covered in trees, mostly pines.

Except hot and dry spells, you will commonly see large smoke plumes here and there on the horizon. That is called “controlled burning”. That is to burn off the underbrush and dead branches, dry pine straw, etc., but not kill the trees. That reduces the kindling and fast fuel that a major fire needs to get started. It works. This method is common across the US in forested areas.

It is illegal in California.

In the meantime, the LA fire dept has spent the last 4 years hiring mostly lesbians as firefighters with no qualifications other than being lesbians.

In the meantime, California has created no new reservoirs since 1979 despite a near doubling of population since.

In the meantime, California passed a $7.5 billion bill to ensure adequate water supply but not a cent has been spent to that purpose. Some of it was used to destroy 4 then existing dams and reservoirs.

A number of years ago, someone ventured that California was rich enough to be stupid. I’m not sure that is the case any more.

Another interesting point: LA, and California in general, has long been famous for the difficulty and time required to get a building permit. We’re talking years for a house. How do you think the 10’s of thousands of people affected by the burning show up to get permits to rebuild their homes and businesses only to be told that they first need an environmental study and permission from 17 different agencies? Do you think there will be hangings? Hopefully.

Cut and Paste Anglo-America

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So, everybody’s been talking about Trump’s let’s-make-a-deal ideas about Greenland and Canada.  I’ll leave the Panama Canal out of this because that’s more of a strategic situation.  But Canada and Greenland are a very interesting opportunity.  All of that northern real estate really makes a lot of sense if the world really is warming, for whatever reason.  Northern Canada and even Greenland might be the new North American breadbasket.  And the mineral wealth of the north is currently incalculably large.

Now some Canadians have been outraged at Trump’s talk about a 51st state.  One Canadian legislator took a shot back and said that California, Oregon and Washington would be better off leaving the US and becoming a part of Canada.  Well, that has its advantages for both sides.  And it inspired me to think about the US and Canada getting together and doing some real horse-trading that would better align the red and blue parts of Anglo-America into two more homogeneous groupings.  Basically, I imagined Canada adding the American Northeast, part of the Great Lakes States and the West Coast while America gets the Rocky Mountain, Plains and Arctic provinces and territories from Canada.  Oh, and we paint Greenland red too.

Think of it.  No more wrangling every four years during the elections.  All of the blue states and the blue provinces together feeling smug and virtuous.  While the red states and provinces will be rid of them and free to enjoy life on our own terms without their constant complaining, lunacy and hypocrisy.

Basically, we would lose about a third of our population but double the size of the country.   They would more than triple their population while losing about a third of the area that was Canada.  But there would be so much more temperate climate than in old Canada that I can’t imagine they’d complain much about it.  One slight problem, their territory would no longer be one contiguous area.  There would be East Coast Wokistan and West Coast Wokistan but what’s a few plane flights between friends?  Plus, they’re bound to start a feud between themselves and that will just give them an excuse to break into two pieces anyway.

So, there it is.  A big beautiful deal just waiting to be brokered by the world’s biggest wheeler-dealer.  Come on make it happen.

 

Region Population Area (square miles)
Current United States of America 335,073,176 3,796,676
Current Canada 41,288,599 3,855,103
Current Greenland 56,583 836,330
New and Improved USA 233,003,747 6,290,802
Whatever is Left Over 143,414,611 2,197,307

Below is an ersatz map of what the two new countries would look like.

 

Below this is the details of the area and populations of the component states and provinces that I used for the calculations above.

Current Regions
Region Population Area (square miles)
 Alabama 5,157,699 52,420
 Alaska 740,133 665,384
 Arizona 7,582,384 113,990
 Arkansas 3,088,354 53,179
 Colorado 5,957,493 104,094
 Delaware 1,051,917 2,489
 District of Columbia 702,250 68
 Florida 23,372,215 65,758
 Georgia 11,180,878 59,425
 Hawaii 1,446,146 10,932
 Idaho 2,001,619 83,569
 Indiana 6,924,275 36,420
 Iowa 3,241,488 56,273
 Kansas 2,970,606 82,278
 Kentucky 4,588,372 40,408
 Louisiana 4,597,740 52,378
 Maryland 6,263,220 12,406
 Michigan 10,140,459 96,714
 Mississippi 2,943,045 48,432
 Missouri 6,245,466 69,707
 Montana 1,137,233 147,040
 Nebraska 2,005,465 77,348
 Nevada 3,267,467 110,572
 New Mexico 2,130,256 121,590
 North Carolina 11,046,024 53,819
 North Dakota 796,568 70,698
 Ohio 11,883,304 44,826
 Oklahoma 4,095,393 69,899
 Pennsylvania 13,078,751 46,054
 South Carolina 5,478,831 32,020
 South Dakota 924,669 77,116
 Tennessee 7,227,750 42,144
 Texas 31,290,831 268,596
 Utah 3,503,613 84,897
 Virginia 8,811,195 42,775
 West Virginia 1,769,979 24,230
 Wisconsin 5,960,975 65,496
 Wyoming 587,618 97,813
Manitoba 1,494,301 250,116
Saskatchewan 1,239,865 251,366
Alberta 4,888,723 255,541
Northwest Territories 44,731 519,734
Yukon 46,704 186,272
Nunavut 41,159 808,185
Greenland 56,583 836,330
New and Improved USA 233,003,747 6,290,802
 California 39,431,263 163,695
 Connecticut 3,675,069 5,543
 Illinois 12,710,158 57,914
 Maine 1,405,012 35,380
 Massachusetts 7,136,171 10,554
 Minnesota 5,793,151 86,936
 New Hampshire 1,409,032 9,349
 New Jersey 9,500,851 8,723
 New York 19,867,248 54,555
 Oregon 4,272,371 98,379
 Rhode Island 1,112,308 1,545
 Vermont 648,493 9,616
 Washington 7,958,180 71,298
Ontario 16,124,116 415,598
Quebec 9,056,044 595,391
Nova Scotia 1,076,374 21,345
New Brunswick 854,355 28,150
British Columbia 5,698,430 364,764
Prince Edward Island 178,550 2,185
Newfoundland and Labrador 545,247 156,453
Whatever is Left Over 143,414,611 2,197,307

 

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 10JAN2025 – California, Then and Now

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war pig

I lived in Calfornia in the early to mid sixties. Nice climate. Cheap gas, but it was still horribly expensive real estate compared to other states at the time. There were enough reservoirs so that we never had a “do not water lawns” restrictions. No brownouts, no blackouts. There were fires but the shrubbery that causes major fires was controlled and sensible and sustainable forestry practices were the norm. I was young and paid zero attention to politics.

We lived not terribly far from Watts during the race rIots. I had no trouble as I knew the kids from school and their parents thought I was polite. Being biracial was also a boon. I had a foot in both camps and my parents had raised me to not separate people by exterior appearances. I also got along with the Hispanic kids as many of them had at least partial Native American ancestry, although most of it was South and Central American tribes such as Aztec. And since I never shunned Black or Hispanic or the growing (back then) Asian population, I was accepted in pretty much all camps. But since then the left has gone to extremes to create racial hatred. It began in universities then trickled down to elementary schools to the idiocy you see today. Any school administration thatallowed drag reviews in primary education back then would have been ran out of town on a rail.

The left follows the Marxist/Leninist doctrine of first infiltrating schools. California is their glowing success. Massive school systems, immense school budgets. Ripe for conquest. Then fund and incite civil unrest.

In the early sixties California was doing almost everything right. Now they are doing almost everything wrong.

 

 

 

 

Good Luck Then!

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Rolling blackouts, whole towns burned off the face of the Earth, multimillion-dollar shacks, endemic rampant crime, homeless encampments everywhere, endless drug addicts, legislated anti-white hate, LGBTQ lunacy, hopeless energy policies and an unaffordable cost of living.  I could go on but why bother?  California has become emblematic of absurd progressive policies and the disastrous effects they’ve caused.

And now when the wealthier parts of Los Angeles are literally going up in smoke some people are wondering if this is the moment when the Californians will turn away from the Democrats and bring in the Republicans to fix the mess.  Well, they might.  But if the Republicans are smart, they won’t sign up for the job.  Specifically, no Republican in his right mind should run for or even accept if appointed to the governorship of California.  Well, let me qualify that.  If the citizens of California also elected a majority of Republicans to the legislature too, then it might have some value.  If all of the insane laws that have been passed in the last thirty years could be cancelled and the state could be put back onto a rational basis then it might work.  But short of that it’s a death trap.  Look what happened to poor hapless Arnold Schwarzeneggar.  The voters elected him to clean up the mess from their previous feckless Democrat governor but basically all he could do was preside over the freak show that the Democrat super-majorities in the legislature ordained.  Of course, he really didn’t put up any fight at all.  So, nobody remembers him fondly.  And the state continued its slide into ruin right on schedule during his term.

Just as when we talk about New York trying to save a sinking ship, the reality of who the voters are in California has to be faced.  The state has an enormous illegal alien population and an equally enormous population of people living off the government in one way or another.  None of these people will ever vote for a Republican or anyone else who promises to balance the books.  No, the system will have to crash so hard that the welfare checks stop getting delivered before the bread and circus crowd will pay attention to how bad things are going.

So where does that leave things?  Well, it looks like any frame houses in Los Angeles are just waiting for the wind and the arsonists to find them.  If I lived in LA, I think I’d get together with my neighbors and cut down all the trees and shrubs in the neighborhood and haul them away.  Then I’d invest in fire-proofing materials to protect my house.  But most importantly, I’d sell my house at whatever price I can get and move out of the Golden State as fast as I possibly could.  Because every time some new atrocity appears on the ground everyone declares that it can’t possibly get any worse and in fact this will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and things will get better.  Well, I don’t think that is even remotely the case.  I think it will get phenomenally worse as more people leave.  The tipping point is already here and we’re just waiting for something like this fire season to find out things like there’s no water in the fire hydrants and the firefighters are now overweight lesbians who won’t be able to carry anyone out of burning buildings and the city has cut the budget for the fire department to pay for DEI training.

And that’s just for something minor like wildfires.  What happens when there’s a major earthquake?  Good luck then.

A Gift Horse in the Mouth

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Having been gob-smacked by reality many times over the course of the last quarter century I would have thought that I was immune to unbridled exuberance when it comes to political happenings.  But I fully confess that for the last week or so I’ve been ridiculously upbeat whenever I look at the news.  And I get the same story from others I talk to on the Right.

Sure, I know not that much has changed.  And not that much will change even after they cart Joe Biden’s corpse off to the glue factory.  But there’s just something cheerful about knowing that Trump somehow defied all the odds and managed to win back the White House and poked a thumb in the eye of all our worst enemies.

I know it’s ridiculous to say but it’s like that moment in the Return of the King when the Ring sinks below the surface of the molten lava inside Mount Doom and Barad-dur comes crashing down.  And it’s not so much that all things will go well for you but rather that your enemy is annihilated utterly.  You can finally let out an exhausted sigh, drop your weary arms and catch your breath while the Dark Lord and all his engines of destruction and plans crumble to dust before your eyes.  MSNBC and the View are like the orcs and trolls at that moment running randomly for their lives.  So good.

Well, that’s a bit much.  Let’s just say it feels pretty good to see the Democrats in disarray and Trump trolling them for all their worth.  Canada, Greenland, Panama Canal?  Oh, come on!

But it sort of feels that way.  After 2020 I thought I’d never feel enthusiastic about American politics again.  It was obvious that the other side would go to any lengths to rig an election; George Floyd riots, COVID, the sky’s the limit.  But somehow, we get this remarkable moment.  It’s almost like the Universe was saying sorry for abusing us as badly as we’d been.  It was like some cosmic do-over was decided upon and things were going to be corrected after some horrible mistake.  It’s as if the referees looked at the game video and reversed a bad call on the field and the play has been called back and we have another chance to win the game.

Now I know all of this is an exaggeration and really there’s nothing all that extraordinary going on.  After all, the Republicans have won plenty of elections and that never stopped them from screwing things up worse than if they had lost that election in the first place.  Think of Bush after winning 2004.  Think of Bush after winning in 1988.  For all I know Trump and company will screw things up so badly that 2028 will be an extinction event for the Right.

Sure, maybe.  But right now, I am experiencing elation, optimism, enthusiasm and I’m walking around with a smile in my heart.  And that’s in the midst of a cold snap here in Dunwich the likes of which we haven’t seen in a few years.  I can’t say how long it will last or whether Trump’s inauguration will affect it or not.  I only know it’s an unexpected gift and you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 09JAN2025 – More Africa

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Africa could do all the wonderful things the author says they can – IF Africans weren’t in charge. If Africa was still a colonial continent it could all be worked out. The colonial powers would not tolerate genocides as in Rwanda, Darfur, Central African Republic, etc, etc, in the nations they controlled by proxy. In my opinion Cote de Ivory is making a mistake in removing the French military presence. That is, unless they plan a little ethnic cleansing of their own, in which the French would interfere. If that is their aim, it makes sense.

Africa is a continent of headmen. The strongest gangster or despot rules until replaced/deposed. Even displaced Africans show tribal/gang behavior in the US, UK, France and elsewhere. There are bright spots. Botswana, Morocco, Tunisia and a few others. But they are bright spots only in comparison to other African nations. The best adapting and hardest working Africans I have known are Nigerians. Those I have known emphasized work, education and morals to their children. We have a very few in my rural, mostly White county and all I have met were good people. Neither they nor their children have any sorts of criminal dealings and as far as I know, none of their children are delinquents or abuse drugs or alcohol. Those are what Africa needs, but they emigrated to the US to escape tough situations in their home nation. One family’s kids work for the best family pizzeria in the County, which strange enough is owned by a Polish family.

Global Let’s Make a Deal – Part 1

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Now that we’ve had a taste of what it’s like to let the third world move into your first world country, I’m pretty sure the majority of Americans can see why it’s a really bad idea.  Many of these people are incapable of living in an advanced society.  They have neither the skills nor the discipline to find a place for themselves in the modern world.  And thus, we see the reason for deportation.  Our society would have to support on many levels people who would not be productive members of this country.

Now let’s pull back a little and look at the really big picture.  The Earth as a whole.  Look at the continent of Africa, the Middle East, Latin America.  Not all of these areas are made up of nothing but failed states full of squalor and crime.  But a lot of it is.  Even look right at our neighborhood.  Haiti is about 650 miles from Key West.  This is a place that has always been desperately poor and politically dysfunctional.  A case could be made that the most stable it’s ever been was under the dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier.  Sure, he stole everything that wasn’t nailed down but he eliminated the gang warfare that exists whenever a strongman isn’t in charge.

Currently, the Haitian government has ceased to exist and the streets are ruled by gang leaders who occasionally dabble in cannibalism to intimidate their rivals and, come to think of it, everyone else.  So, what we see is the kind of stone age tribalism that existed in prehistoric times.  But now instead of hundreds or thousands of cave men we’re looking at places that have millions or even billions of people adding to the chaos.

I guess the easiest answer to what should be done is to build walls at our borders and let them sort it out for themselves.  That is one solution.  My guess is that would slowly return these areas to the population densities that existed before the Industrial Revolution.  I say this because I assume the incredible increase in the population of Sub-Saharan Africa is completely dependent on food and medicine and technology that is provided by Western countries.  If these things were taken away there would be an initial dying off of the population followed by a new equilibrium population at a much lower level than currently found.  And stabilized in this way life would eventually resume its pre-colonial pattern with tribal people living a subsistence existence.

But that is a temporary condition.  In the long run most of the third world locations will be considered useful for their mineral or other resources.  For example, the Republic of Congo has a large list of minerals that are considered critical for many important industries.  So even though it is one of the poorest and least stable places on Earth, Western (and Eastern) countries are greatly interested in the right to extract this wealth.  But what to do about the Congolese?

And this same question applies to many other places.  What is the path forward when the people who live somewhere are hopelessly backward?  The old colonial model was to come in and take over and treat the natives as essentially subjects.  Think of the British in India or Africa.  They organized the natives into employees in the industries that the British saw as profiting Britain.  So, agriculture or mining or whatever wealth could be extracted.  Well, if we remember out twentieth century history, that didn’t work out in the end.  Basically, the communists taught the natives about the concept of the consent of the ruled.  And thus, we see the fragments of the various colonial empires looking around and trying to figure out how to rule themselves as successfully and efficiently as the Europeans did.  But for the most part, the third world is still the dysfunctional third world.  Something new is needed.

What it seems to me will have to evolve is a symbiotic relationship between the first and third worlds.  Currently we cut a deal with whatever strongman is running Congo or Venezuela or Libya and he takes 90% of the money that belongs to his people.  And this goes on until the next leader takes over and the same pattern repeats.  It seems to me that we are in a position to help ourselves but also pull some of these places into modernity.  I’m not talking about trying to turn Afghans into feminists or any nonsense like that.  I’m wondering if we can create a buffer state within these backward places that can act as an incubator for progress.

Let’s think about that for Part 2.

How Sweet It Is

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I watched a few video clips today.  There were a few highlights.  Justin Trudeau did his sad face and said he will resign his office as PM in March.  Oh, boo, hoo.  Very sad, too bad.

And then I saw that sideshow with a smiling Kamala next to Speaker Johnson as she read out the numbers on her Electoral College loss to Donald Trump in the November election.  Yay, Kamala!  You go girl!  Brat Summer Kamala, woo hoo!  That’s the fun way to imagine a future of winning unencumbered by pathetic present-day failure.

So that’s the four-year anniversary of J6.  Well, that’s a pretty good day.  I guess it could have been better.  Maybe Joe Biden wandering into a jet engine or off a parapet.  But it will definitely do.  So that will be the last of J6 for the rest of eternity.  Well, not quite.  We can expect some Congressional investigations that may end up in Kash Patel’s lap to prosecute.  But that’s a story for another day.  Let’s just say there won’t be any more anniversaries on the news.

When I think about what the next few months will be like I’m guessing most of what we’ll see will be the Senate cabinet approval hearings.  And the captured media will broadcast the likes of Adam Schiff, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer grandstanding rumors and slander against all of the Trump nominees.  That’s only to be expected.

But it makes me wonder what kind of strategy is being formulated by the principals in meetings with Trump right now.  After all, time is short and there’s a lot to do.  Hopefully they’ve long ago assembled long lists of government employees based on either actual crime against the American people or responsibility for divisions or areas of the bureaucracy where crimes were committed.

As an example, if I were Kash Patel I’d search out the documents that declared that white men made up the most dangerous terrorist threat to the United States and get all the names associated with that decision.  Then these people could be brought into the Senate and made to testify.  And they would have to provide some factual basis for these pronouncements.  Of course, at the end of the whole thing they’d be fired for sure.  But toying with them would be fun.  It would be sort of like the show trials that Stalin and his boys used to put on in Moscow.  Who knows?  Some of them might even name names when tempted by the hope (false of course) of saving their jobs.  Maybe they’d give up Wray or Garland.  But either way it would be fun.

If Trump wanted to really increase his popularity, he could go back to his reality tv roots and set up a weekly program on X or Truth Social or wherever, on which he provided a running tally of how much money he had saved the US government by firing bureaucrats.  And he could highlight the show with a profile of some especially over-paid leech that also had caused some particularly egregious harm to the American public.  I want to nominate Rachel Levine as the stand out for week 1.  This eye sore has been a boil on the neck of this country ever since it was first announced he would be donning the skirt and wig as United States Assistant Secretary for Health in the Department of Health and Human Services.  And just to add insult to injury he is now an “admiral” somehow.

Trump could reuse his “You’re fired” tagline but instead of calling the show, “The Apprentice,” he could call it, “The Ejected.”  Maybe he can have a graphic that shows the victim being launched from his office chair and follow a trajectory that lands somewhere novel each week.  One day it could be into the ocean or maybe a shark tank, another time it could be one of those industrial scale wood chippers, the ones you can throw a whole redwood into.  Now of course no one would actually be harmed but think of how much fun it would be imagining it.

Well, as you can see, I’m letting my imagination get the best of me.  But that’s what it’s like before Trump takes office.  Later on, the reality of the constraints that government puts on the president will sink in.  But for now, it’s Rachel Levine in a trajectory headed for the moon.  How sweet it is!

Change to Get Behind

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Greetings folks.  In 2025 the big news is corporations (and the federal government) will be bringing all their workers back to the office again.  I guess a five-year vacation is about enough.  With an actual president in charge, it seems like people will need to stop watching YouTube videos all day and start wearing pants again.  But not you Jeffrey Toobin.  That ship has sailed.

The new meme that’s out there coming from the Left is “Let’s forget the past and find common ground.”  Which translates to “We tried to destroy all of you and Trump but failed so how about we make believe we don’t hate you in exchange for you doing everything we tell you to do.”  It’s such a tempting offer.  It has almost everything, except us winning.  You see this from Democrat congressmen and senators.  They’ll tell you how nothing will be passed without their approval so the compromise position is Republicans let them dictate the acceptable legislation agenda.

I guess we’re about to find out if Johnson and Thune are any better than Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell were back in Trump’s first term.  It’s a cinch they can’t be any worse.  Luckily, I think Trump has learned a thing or two in the interim and he won’t let these turkeys screw things up like their predecessors.  In fact, maybe Trump intends to administer the government more or less by executive order.  If I were in his shoes, I think I would declare a national emergency and pay for the deportation by commandeering private resources like airliners and rail transportation to funnel these people into Mexico and let the Mexicans figure out how to get rid of them.

And I’m only half joking about how to handle the deportations.  I think a national emergency will allow him to sideline every local democrat judge who will attempt to block his every move.  Because it truly is a national emergency and whatever he has to do to fix this is justified and in the long run cost effective.  I can’t even imagine how many billions of dollars are currently spent on the feeding, housing, medical care and judicial costs for these tens of millions of illegal aliens.

But this is just me talking.  Does Donald Trump have a plan that will accomplish the things he says he will do and does he have the nerve to follow through on those plans in the face of relentless opposition from the Democrats in congress, in the courts and all of the deep state personnel who will do everything imaginable to prevent this from happening?

I think Trump should stage the deportation process to allow himself as much cover as possible.  He should start by deporting all the serious criminals; the felons and the gang members.  Practicing on this soft target will deflect a lot of the outrage and at the same time give him a chance to find all of the pitfalls and roadblocks that exist.  Also, he can use them as the worst case for what he can expect from the home countries of the aliens.  One of the Central American countries (can’t remember if it’s Honduras or Guatemala) has already stated that they will retaliate for their citizens being deported by evicting American troops from their country.

Well, it doesn’t sound like much of a threat.  After we finish transferring their criminals back home, we can then pack up our troops and send them home.  Win, win.

I guess, like everyone else, I’m anxious to see what Trump looks like in action.  I don’t expect miracles but I’m curious to see just how hard he punishes his enemies in the federal executive agencies.  Kash Patel will be the test case.  He’s on record as saying he wants to shut down the FBI building and turn it into a museum.  I hope he doesn’t.  I’d prefer he just empty out the building, one fired FBI agent at a time until it’s down to single digit occupancy.  Now that’s change I can get behind.